Tag Archives: self righteousness

[This is an excerpt from Secrets to a Happy Life, based on the story of Joseph in the Bible. Joseph’s brothers at long last bow before him, not realizing his identity…]

When the brothers made the epic trek to Egypt, they stood before the Prime Minister to buy grain. He just happened to be their long-lost, mortally-offended brother. Joseph recognized his brothers, but they didn’t recognize him.

This made for all kinds of comical irony.

The Bible describes four cycles in their conversation, and it wasn’t good. Joseph initiated each cycle with an accusation:

Genesis 42:7 “he spoke roughly to them.”

Genesis 42:9 “he said to them, ‘You are spies!'”

Genesis 42:12 “He said to them, ‘No but you have come to spy out the land!'”

Genesis 42:14 “And Joseph said to them, ‘It is as I have told you, you are spies…'”

What was going on?

God was slapping them upside the head with a life-defining truth: the greatest disaster that can ever happen to a human being is settling into a lifestyle beneath your true identity.

So, in his mercy, God freezes his children before the mirror of truth and bids us take a long hard look. What might you see?

Deception, conniving, a false front

Bitterness, resentment, an unforgiving heart

Revenge, passive-agressiveness

Evil, cruelty, meanness, abuse

Selfishness, narcissism, self-justification, self-promotion

Broken relationships

Theft, greed, coveting, grasping, pleonexia

Slander, backbiting, gossip

Plotting

Rebellion

Pride, self-righteousness, religiosity, judgmentalism

Exclusivity, racism, sexism

Hypocrisy

Woundedness, neediness, desperation

Temper, rage, seething hostility

Self-pity, self-loathing, self-destruction

Despair, quitting, giving up

Welcome to the human race: you have baggage.

When you deny it, your baggage defines you.

When you admit it, your identity in God begins to define you.

God has a place for all that baggage: at the foot of the cross where Jesus died. Leave it there. Let it go. Because Jesus will carry it far away over the ocean of God’s forgiveness and drop it into the depths of forgetfulness.

Your past need never haunt you again. It doesn’t define you. It need not dominate you. Yes, there might be consequences – lasting and difficult – but they do not change your identity in Christ. You are who God says you are, no matter what the evils, losses, traumas, and bullies from the past say about you.

Until you shed the false identity crusting over your true self, your glorious true identity stays mired in the dirt.

Because of Christ’s Cross, closure for past guilt is your birthright in the family of God.

“Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, ‘I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.’ Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.”

[John R. W. Stott, The Message of Galatians (London, 1968), 179.]

As a pastor, I tailor my instruction to the audience.

Sometimes, I’m talking to people who are broken and desperate. They need to be built up, as Jesus did for the woman caught in adultery. Continue reading →